The impression is of a music—and a religious attitude—supremely untouched by “Renaissance”
humanism. Such music is still a loftily decorative art rather than one expressive of its occasion. And it is
still one that insists upon the difference—or rather the distance—between the human and the divine.
That was explicitly the reaction of a Venetian diplomat who was privileged to attend High Mass at
one of Henry VIII’s royal chapels, sung by choristers “whose voices,” he marveled, “were more divine
than human.” His other comment is best left in his own Italian words: Non contavano ma giubilavano,
“they did not so much sing as jubilate,” the last being a word that has carried a charge of religious
emotion for us since the days of St. Augustine, who described jubilus-singing as “a mind pouring itself
forth in a joy beyond words.”
At the most basic level, it came down to a difference in how music and words were supposed to
connect. Where continental musicians strove to make their music reflect both the shape and the meaning of
the texts to which it was set, and none more successfully than Willaert, the insular musician remained true
to an older attitude, according to which the music contributed something essentially other than what human
language could encompass. The English melismas continued to hide the text, so to speak, from aural view,
and thus preempt it. Next to the work of Taverner, the ars perfecta is revealed as a fundamentally
rationalized art, an art whose tone had been lowered in the name of reason, brought down to earth.
The English still sought the opposite. Their music, aspiring to raise the listener’s mind up above the
terrestrial, provided a sensory overload: higher treble parts than anywhere else, lower bass parts, richer
harmonies—including that special English tingle, the suspended sixth (given a spotlight at the very end of
Taverner’s Sanctus; see Ex. 15-8b). Motivic imitation—an orderly, rational procedure if ever there was
one—is only a sporadic decoration here, never a structural frame.
EX. 15-8B John Taverner, Missa Gloria Tibi Trinitas, Benedictus, mm. 26–end